Adjunct processors are commonly used with telecommunications switching systems to provide features and other capabilities that are not available from the switching system itself. An illustrative example of an adjunct processor is a voice messaging system that interacts with callers to provide a voice message-delivery service between calling and called parties.
A conventional way for a person to interact with an adjunct processor such as a voice messaging system is through his or her telephone keypad, which responds to the person's button presses by generating dual-tone multi-frequency (DTMF also known as Touch-Tone) control signals and sending them to the adjunct processor. An unfortunate limitation of this user interface is that it requires the person to have a DTMF telephone. Consequently, the many persons who have traditional rotary-pulse telephones and/or desire the convenience of interactive voice responsive systems are excluded from obtaining the services of the adjunct processor.
A way to overcome this limitation is to equip the adjunct processor with a voice- or speech-recognition facility, which enables persons to interact with the adjunct processor through spoken commands. While such a facility may be built into newly-designed adjunct processors, it is often impractical, e.g., for cost reasons, to do so. And it is difficult to impossible to add such a facility to existing adjunct processors, because speech processing consumes large amounts of computing resources, which the adjunct processor normally cannot spare, because (particularly for older systems) the source code required to modify the processor may no longer be available, and/or because it is not practical or possible to add new boards to the processor. Hence, it is preferable to provide the voice- or speech-recognition facility as a separate unit—as an adjunct processor to the adjunct processor.
Voice- or speech-recognition units are normally configured to terminate all input signals, not to terminate some (e.g., control commands) and to pass through others (e.g., voice messages to be recorded). Consequently, without the use of additional circuits, a voice- or speech-recognition unit normally cannot be connected—either in series or in parallel—to the same switching system port as the adjunct processor which it is to serve. And while bridging, conferencing, or service observing arrangements (which can connect a plurality of terminals (e.g., telephone station sets or adjunct processors) in parallel to a single call) are known, they are not usable as conventionally implemented to connect a voice- or speech-recognition unit to the same call as an adjunct processor but at a different switching system port. This is because they normally feed to the receiver of the bridged, conferenced, or service-observing unit the combined output of all other units connected to the call. Consequently, they would combine both the caller's output signals and the adjunct processor's output signals on the same link or channel for input to the voice- or speech-recognition unit, making it impossible for this unit to determine the source of the input and hence to distinguish between the caller's control commands on the one hand and prompts and messages being played out by the adjunct processor on the other hand.